"Josh Stern" <jstern / foshay.citilink.com> wrote
in message news:3a611598$0$58614$65a95bcd / news.citilink.com...
>
> >In my experience overloading based on type of arguments is not a
> >good idea either. Mistakes can be made that are confusing,
>
> One could say the same thing about every feature of every
> language...and that goes double for every feature that is partly
> syntactic sugar for programmer convenience.

Which is why I like Ruby. It leans toward simplicity.

> There are important programming techniques, such as generic
> programming, that become unavailable to a strongly typed language in
> that case.

I don't like strongly typed languages, period. End of sentence.

> Ruby doesn't need overloading in order to do generic programming
> because it is weakly typed.

Ruby is *dynamically* typed. C++ is _weakly_ typed.

> But weak typing allows for extra errors to occur.

The benefits of dynamic languages outweigh the benefits of static
languages, IME.

> So far as I can see, the only motivation to allow overloading based
> on types in Ruby would be as a partial substitute for strong typing,
> to be used at the programmer's discretion.

That's the version I won't move to. Ruby is open source, and I'll just
hang back at the previous version.

--
Patrick Logan
mailto:patrickdlogan / home.com